Author Profile

Screenwriter, healthcare IT consultant, cinephile, oboist, erstwhile physicist, sports fan, and Wisconsinite.
My blog, Northwoods Listener, features an eclectic mix of subjects – history, philosophy, Shakespeare, music, and classic film, to name a few. You may also hear about various sports in their seasons and especially about professional tennis, whose season lasts for nearly the entire calendar year.
Please see my first post, "3, 2, 1,..." (http://wp.me/p4OZFj-4) for additional biographical information.
I am on LinkedIn (Cynthia Tanner, Madison, Wisconsin), on Facebook ("Northwoods Listener"), and on Twitter (@CJSTTwo).

Categories

3, 2, 1,…

Here goes.

Northwoods Listener opens today for business – a happy business of reflection, musing, exposition, description, and conversation.

Here you will find an eclectic mix of subjects – history, philosophy, Shakespeare, music, and classic film, to name a few. You may also hear about various sports in their seasons and especially about professional tennis, whose season lasts for nearly the entire calendar year.

Current events may inspire some posts. Others might be infused with an admixture of politics or religion.

For today I would like to introduce myself sans demographic pigeonholes which, in my opinion, can be counterproductive.

I am a native of eastern Pennsylvania. My antecedents hailed from nine different ethnic or national groups. The earliest arrived in North America in 1632 and the latest in about 1910. I have ancestors who served in every U.S. military conflict through the 1970s, including as combatants on both sides of the War Between the States (a.k.a. Civil War) in the 1860s.

I grew up primarily in the American Midwest, taking for granted neighbors who identified as Americans instead of as members of specific ethnic groups, and communities in which nine or ten religious denominations flourished side by side without conflict.

I have lived in seven American states and visited 48 of the 50 – all except Kansas and Alaska – and several countries.

As an undergraduate I majored in physics and mathematics. My favorite class covered Russian history from 1812 to 1917 and was taught by the son of a Serbian Orthodox priest.

I earned a Ph.D. in physics from UC-Berkeley and served for three years as an assistant professor on the physics and astronomy faculty of a small Midwestern liberal arts college.

Later I worked in the healthcare IT industry and witnessed firsthand the rise in government involvement in U.S. healthcare.

I have also written a feature-length screenplay.

(Actually, when that story came to me, it insisted on my attention, and the screenplay essentially wrote itself. It was a fascinating experience that might provide grist for an essay on another day.)

I am hoping to post here weekly.

Thank you for reading.

More soon.

Quote for Today

“In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock.” – Thomas Jefferson